“Well,” said the Hog again; and the Mouse quickly set his teeth, fighting an urge to cut through the Hog’s fat obsequiousness and to talk himself. Trees grow slowly. Hogs talk slowly—but they didn’t have a whole season now for polite—and stupid—conversation!
“It would be the hon-or-able thing to do”—the Hog snuffled slowly at the ground—“if you, sir, granted your per-mis-sion that we form a pro-ces-sion and take him out of the land, to bury him in some right and distant place. Hon-or-ably, to be sure.” The Hog took a moment to overturn a stone. “Lord Senex, we mean,” he said.
“No!” The word came in a loud bass voice. Everyone had been looking at Cockatrice, expecting the decision to be his. But he hadn’t spoken. He only continued to twist his tail and to regard them all with his red eye as from a great distance. With astonishment everyone glanced from Cockatrice to Toad; and then it was clear that he had spoken.
Nevertheless, when the Hog began to speak again, all eyes were back on Cockatrice.
“ ‘No,’ you say,” said the Hog. “But surely you un-der-stand custom, and surely you are com-mit-ted to the good purpose of very old custom, and it is our custom to bury our dead. Lord Senex, the Rooster with his Back to the Mountains.”
“Custom, crap!” the Mouse cried out suddenly, unable to stand it any longer. “He stinks, and it’s killing us!”
“And besides ev-ery-thing else,” continued the Hog, “his body is in a state of decay, no fault of his, of course—nor any fault to you, sir.”
(“Damn!” said the Mouse.)
“He is pu-tre-fying, sir, and you yourself may have noticed that he sends up a ter-ri-fic odor, and that odor, if you please, is un-healthy. It is hurting us.”
“Killing us! Killing us!” cried the Mouse.
“No!” It was Toad again, burping answers out of his thick throat, while Cockatrice looked on with his mouth closed.
“And so again you say ‘No,’ ” said the Hog. “But perhaps you do not un-der-stand the pe-ti-tion—”
“The body stays where it is. No honorable,” burped Toad, “no end to the smell. No burial. Get out of here!”
It was astonishing to see how the members of the committee so easily hunched their shoulders, and turned, and left, each in his own direction; for with that last word the committee had abruptly dissolved, and it was no more. All except for the Mouse. He remained with burning eyes and a vibrating chest, so quickly was he breathing, so full of hatred was he.
“Murderer!” he squeaked at Cockatrice; but Cockatrice, with one lazy flap of his wings, ascended to a branch in the oak, found a perch, and looked out over the land. “Murderer!” the Mouse shrieked again; and Toad, suddenly left alone, bounced round to the other side of the tree trunk to hide himself.
From there Toad burped: “You heard Cockatrice. Get out of here!”
After the failure of the committee, the animals of the land broke apart. Each began to make his own way in the world. Each family created its own remedies against the terrible, killing stench—but then kept those remedies to itself and grew narrow eyed and suspicious over-against its neighbors. Each family sought its own food, stored it in secret places, then wept in frustration upon finding that the stench would always rot it, wherever it was hidden. But there had to be a blame for such a continuous disaster; so every family blamed the next, with dire threats and menacing looks as they passed one another. The animals of the land descended from speech to snarls, barks, roars, and bleated accusations. And the children, those left living, feared to leave their homes.
Almost as evil as the stench was the silence. Senex, however poorly he had ended his rule, had always remembered the canonical crows. He sang them, to be sure, in a disoriented manner; but he did sing them, keeping his animals that way, banding them, unifying them. But Cockatrice never crowed the canon. So under him the day lost its meaning and its direction, and the animals lost any sense of time or purpose. Their land became strange to them. A terrible feeling of danger entered their souls, of things undone, of treasures unprotected. They were tired all the day long, and at night they did not sleep. And it was a most pitiful sight to see, how they all went about with hunched shoulders, heads tucked in, limping here and there as if they were forever walking into an ill wind, and flinching at every sound as if the wind carried arrows.
And their confusion became dreadful when one day the Mouse ran among them, screaming for them to come and see Senex’s body.
“You thought it was one thing,” he cried. “But you’ve got to know! You have to know that it is something else, something worse! Don’t blind yourselves! Come and see!”
For the last time in that land, all of the animals did one thing together. The Mouse’s intensity moved them. Together they went to the Coop and looked.
And Senex was only bones. Dry bones with a scrap of feather here and there. A sad little skull, ribs needle thin, and strange yellow claws—colored as if they alone were left alive. The animals blinked.
“Don’t you understand?” the Mouse cried. “Senex doesn’t make this stink, and it will not go away with him. Something else makes it. Something else is killing us! And we will be nothing until we find out.” He lowered his voice and glared at the ring of animals around the bones and himself. “I’ll give you a name,” he said. No one encouraged him. No one discouraged him. “The name, Cockatrice. The stench came with him. There is nothing left of Senex to rot. But Cockatrice sits in his Oak, and the stench remains. He is no Lord. He is an enemy.”
At the first mention of Cockatrice, the animals on the outer edge of the circle simply turned and began to walk away; and as the Mouse continued his desperate pleading, the circle shrank altogether—until the Hog was the last to leave. The Mouse skittered after him and bit his leg.
“Damn fools!” he squeaked. “Ignorant, mindless, stupid, sloppy, mad, damn fools!” But the Hog spun on the Mouse, nearly killed him with a snap of his jaws, then lumbered on.
Shaking with frustration, the Mouse turned back to the bones of the old Rooster. Then he saw that one creature yet remained: Toad, hugely blinking his eyes.
“The name of Cockatrice in vain,” Toad burped. “Useless, little bitty Mouse. All your chatter—useless. Cockatrice sends me to say: No more meetings. No more gatherings. No more talk among the animals! Hush,” whispered Toad, a green foot in front of his mouth as if warning a child. “Hush. Go about your own business and forget the others. Oh, and the Oak, she has a name. She is the Terebinth Oak.”
The Mouse shot furiously at Toad; but in three fat hops he had disappeared safely inside the Coop and was gone.
Toad went into the Coop for more than safety. He had a mission there as well.
The hundred Hens sat quietly, each upon her own nest, fearful to move anywhere. The place seemed a most foreboding, dark, uneasy hospital.
“Let me see,” burped the pigeon-footed and ugly Toad. When no one offered to let him see anything, he commanded: “In the name of Cockatrice, let me see!” Then he squeezed underneath the nearest Hen. She leaped up with a painful squawk. Three eggs were discovered. Toad broke each of them, then ordered the poor Hen out of the Coop.
This he did with each Hen. Those who were laying he sent out; those who were not stayed in. Finally, the layers in a flock he forced toward the river and the Terebinth Oak, where Cockatrice awaited them.
Cockatrice was not altogether idle, in those days. He wanted children. Hundreds and hundreds, thousands of children; and, almost casually, he ignored the tears and the cries of the Hens, and he went about getting himself children—all in the open, all underneath the Terebinth Oak.
Soon the hens bore the blank look of despair upon their faces. Hope, self-esteem, life itself had been tortured out of them, and they had become feathered machinery, bent to Cockatrice’s bloodless will. Cockatrice never looked them in the eyes. He offered nothing for an egg.
And so the space under the Oak was crowded with eggs, waiting to hatch.
For the first time Cockatrice roused himself. Let but one poor animal step too closely to this treasure, and Cockatrice would swoop so suddenly and so wildly from the tree that the creature would die of a faint heart.
Toad spent time moving among and turning the eggs.
“Over, my pretty,” he burped motherly. “The sun on your tummy, the sun on your back, to color your coming a poisonous black! I hear you, my pretty. But give it a little time. Time before you hatch.” He slept on top of the eggs. Cockatrice never slept.
When the first round of eggs did hatch, the Hens, even in their death walk, were horrified. Some had placed some expectation upon the next generation. Some had even conceived a distorted affection for what Cockatrice had borne upon them. But the creatures which crawled out of these eggs were in no way like chicks. Black, licorice long, damp, each with two burning eyes in its head and teeth already in its mouth, they were small, curled serpents. Basilisks.
Cockatrice swept into the hatching eggs. He roared a greeting which terrified every animal in the land. Then he opened his enormous mouth and swallowed up serpent after serpent. With his throat bulging, he took to the air, flew in great, triumphant circles, writhing his tail frightfully, and then passed low over the river water. There he vomited his brood, and the Basilisks fell like a black rain into the water.
With energy he drove the Hens to produce more and more eggs, even among the shells of the latter ones. He was obsessed; and Toad himself took no more joy in the high office of egg turner, but began to shrink from the watchful red eye above him. Oh, Cockatrice had his children! He had them by the thousands. And again and again he performed the ceremony of a flight and a black rain of Basilisks into the river.
But one Hen, even underneath her agony, kept life within her. She did it by a small plot which she carried out night after night, eternally. She had found a stone the size of an egg, and during the day she sat obediently upon this stone. But when night fell, she would push it to the lower end of her sitting, and then quietly beat herself against the stone, slowly, but with force and with pain. Every true egg inside of her she crushed this way before it was laid.
She had a patch of crimson feathers at her throat.
At the beginning of this borning process, it had been Toad’s habit at least to chat and banter with the Hens. He played a middle road, doing service for Cockatrice, but at the same time searching for a little forgiveness from the Hens, who were being so sadly used. But the more earnest Cockatrice became about his children, the more irritable Toad became about everything. He was losing place. He, who had brooded Cockatrice into this world, was losing the favor of Cockatrice. Toad wanted something, then—something to win back the favor of his Lord and to prove his importance.
Therefore, he was not silent when he came upon the stone egg.
Toad still examined the Hens, searched their openings to see by the size of them whether this Hen or that one continued to be a layer. This without apology or grace: He crawled underneath them where they sat.
One day he pushed himself out from under the Hen with fire at her throat and began to scream:
“Now, now, here it is!” he cried, hopping among the Hens. “What I was looking for! What I knew would be! Treachery, Cockatrice! Oh, treachery! A stone egg that can never hatch!”
His cry turned Cockatrice’s head. It also brought a small Mouse out of the fields.
As soon as Cockatrice was looking, Toad began to hop against the guilty Hen. While she did nothing to protect herself, he fired his fat body like a dumdum at her neck and head, and she began to choke and to cough. “Treachery! Treachery!” cried Toad with every attack.
Immediately the Mouse was there. He fastened his tiny teeth in Toad’s face and would not let go. A flurry rippled through the other Hens. A few animals were drawn closer by the screaming.
Toad forgot the Hen. Hop by broken hop, dragging the vicious Mouse with him, he struggled closer to the Terebinth Oak. He cried a new tune:
“Son of my sitting!” he burbled pitifully. “Save me! They’re murdering me!”
Not to save the Toad, but for other reasons of his own, Cockatrice opened his mouth and roared like thunder above the noise: “CHILDREN!”
It may have been that, encouraged by the Mouse’s fight, some of the gathering animals were considering a fight of their own. Perhaps one creature’s spirit could give spirit to the others, and a true revolt might begin. A Black Bear was up on his hind legs, waving his arms with menace. A Wolf was tensing his muscles for a deadly spring. But none of that matters much.
For as soon as Cockatrice roared his order over the land, the river began to boil—hectic churning. Then out of the water, by the thousands, the Basilisks poured. They slimed their way across the land with incredible speed. They shot like arrows among the animals, bit them with poison in their bite, and killed the poor astonished creatures where they stood.
Frantically the Hens exploded away from the Terebinth Oak, and some few survived; but the rest were no match, and they died.
The Mouse was killed at the very trunk of the Oak, for he had not taken his teeth out of Toad’s face, and he had not run. But so was Toad killed. Before the Basilisks there was no distinction one from the other.
Then the thousands of Basilisks spread outward from the Oak into all the land, killing and killing every living body they came upon. No animal was prepared to meet such an enemy. None was able to return the fight. Like a black fire the Basilisks ate the land dead until not a soul was left in it, except Cockatrice sitting silently in his tree. The Hog lay down with a single bite in his neck. The Bear with a bite between his toes was cast upon the ground, his eyes still open. The Wolf had gone so far as to snap one serpent up; but that serpent had bitten the Wolf on his tongue and then had slithered unharmed out of a dead Wolf’s mouth.
No longer was Cockatrice’s gaze faraway. This, now, was his business. From the top of the Terebinth Oak he watched the slaughter with attention and with cheer. “Children,” he breathed over and over to himself. “Ah, my children.”
And from below the ground, from within the prison of the earth, there spoke another, greater voice: “Circumspice, Domine,” Wyrm rumbled powerfully, almost peacefully. “Videat Deus caedem meum.”
“Let God in his heaven witness all my murder,” spoken in the language of the powers.
When that land—once under the rule of Senex, the Rooster with his Back to the Mountains—had become a sepulcher and a wilderness with the dead lying everywhere, then the Basilisks withdrew again into the river. Then Cockatrice himself—in his own good time—left the place. He took to his mighty wings and flew west, for so the river flows.
And then it began to rain on earth.
[TWELVE] The rains
The wasted land, the shattered society, the bodies dead and festering, were all great Wyrm’s triumph. In one small part of the earth his Keepers had been first weakened and then killed. Their lives, which locked his life beneath them in the earth; their banded peace, which chained him there; their goodly love, which was his torment; their righteousness, which was iron against his will—that fabric had in one place on the earth been torn.
So one part of the earth’s crust was softened, and Wyrm rejoiced. Could he but spread that soft, vulnerable area across a continent and to the sea, then he could himself blast through the crust, break free, and gallop through the spheres of the universe. Oh, he would swallow the moon in a gulp. He would bloody the sun. And he would roar almighty challenges to the Lord God Himself. He would spew chaos among the stars; and he would whirl his tail with such power that when it hit the earth, that planet would be cracked from its fixed position at the center of things to spin like nonsense going nowhere. While Cockatrice flew westward above, Wyrm dreamed dreams below: He himself would make of his earth prison
a puny mockery. He would make it little among the planets and nothing among the suns. He would snatch purpose from its being, giving it a loose, erratic, meaningless course to travel. He would surround it with cold, empty space. And he would cancel heaven from above it.
Oh, how Wyrm hated this round ball, the earth! How he yearned to be out of it forever, to see it a piece of dust, whimpering from the edge of a galaxy for its God!
Therefore, when the Lord God saw that the land just west of the mountains had fallen to Wyrm’s deceit, God himself cloaked the entire earth in cloud. He shut it up. Sadly, he closed it from the rest of creation, and he left it to other Keepers to keep Wyrm imprisoned.
That was when the rains began.
So, although he could not know it, it was a very lonely rain which fell on Chauntecleer the day he sat alone upon his mud heap in an empty field. And the clouds that covered his first meeting with the Beautiful Pertelote—they were God’s doing. And the war which he was about to fight—it was of tremendous significance.
One thing the Lord God did do for his Keepers, that they be not altogether alone in the struggle to come: He sent his messenger to them. The Dun Cow, her eyes so full of compassion, appeared in Chauntecleer’s land to speak a word or two.
Yet, despite these convulsions above and below him, Chauntecleer the Rooster pottered through his life in regular Rooster fashion, enjoying his marriage and looking toward the spring. He could do that simply because he was ignorant of matters greater than his Coop. Perhaps that was good. Perhaps not. In either case, that’s the way that it was.
[THIRTEEN] The spring, with foreblessing and foreboding
Because something fell out of the sky daily, even into the spring, the winter snow left with a weird speed that year. It had heaped itself so monumentally across Chauntecleer’s land that the Coop had finally been sitting in a deep, white scallop. But then, between a night and a day, snowfall turned to drizzle and mist. The mist froze at a touch upon the snow, which, for a night and a day, had the smooth, shining, and eerie shapes of ice on top of it. Another night and another day, and the ice was etched and gouged by channels of racing water, and the Coop withstood a perilous splashing. Then thunderstorms broke the weather: growling first in the east, striding by wide thunder steps toward the Coop, then suddenly cracking asunder the sky and the earth with wild, stuttering lightning. And that was it for the snow. But the water yet flowed everywhere.
The Book of the Dun Cow Page 8